The Whispering Muse by Sjon

the end of the bed, and Jason tied a heavy sandbag to the end of each strap. Next, slings were placed under my knees which were then hoisted up, each weighed down by a sandbag. It took me two weeks to get used to the “cross” from which I was to hang for four months altogether. All that time I suffered from a nagging ache in the nail holes, though this was alleviated when I drank the wine that Iphenoa brought me every morning.
    ‘Before Jason could crucify me he had to bore holes through my legs below the knees, using a fairly hefty drill for the job. Apparently I told Jason that it would prove hard to drill through the bones of a man who had been granted the gift by blue-haired Poseidon of being impervious to sharp weapons. This proved correct, for the drill got stuck for an age in the bone, and one handle after another snapped off, but Jason broke through in the end and immediately started on the other leg.
    ‘But it was not only the toughness of my legs that betrayed my past. During the struggle to heal myself my body reverted to the shape it used to have before my metamorphosis sixteen years earlier. I myself wasn’t aware of this until one of the girls who helped me to breathe held up a mirror below my belly. I saw that my penis had shrunk until it exactly resembled the penis of a five-year-old boy, both in size and behaviour, and its proportion to a man’s body was like what you would see on a Renaissance sculpture (at last I understood why the nurses had been giggling at me). Moreover I had moulted like a wolf in spring. My chest was white and soft again – with the swell of maidenly breasts.
    ‘Yes, once I was a girl. My name was Caenis and I did as I pleased. We lived in Thessaly. My father, Elatus, was king of the Lapiths. He was a conventional man and the day I reached marriageable age he began to pester me to wed. It would certainly have been an easy task for the king to find me an eligible bridegroom – such as a hero who was both heir to a kingdom and a monster-slayer to boot – for I was famed throughout the lands for my intellect and radiant beauty. Indeed, I was so intelligent and fair that my half-brother Polyphemus used to call me Thena or Dite in an attempt to get a rise out of me. But as is often the case with independent girls, I paid little heed to my father’s talk of marriage: like the grass that bears hermaphroditic flowers and fertilises itself, I bloomed for myself alone.
    ‘King Elatus found the situation most unfortunate, and the same could be said of the suitors who had waited full of anticipation for the day when the princess would be offered up for grabs. The greatest champions on earth had gathered there, bold men and true; I would get to know many of them in my new life as a man since several were destined to be my shipmates on the Argo.
    ‘I was allowed to have my own way. The host of heroes moved on to the next country and commenced wooing the king’s daughter there. My father turned to more agreeable tasks than bickering with his daughter. And who knows, my existence might have continued in this satisfactory state had news of the obdurate girl in Thessaly not carried beyond our mortal world.
    ‘Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished – and I breathed it in.
    ‘It was there that the god found me.
    ‘The cove emptied of seawater. It was as if a wet quilt had been stripped from the ocean floor. There’s a pretty shell, I thought to myself and walked over to a sugar-pink snail’s house that lay on the sand. I bent down, picked up the conch and weighed it in my hand: well, I never, here’s a gift for Eurydice.
    ‘Then the heavy wave broke over